Then She Found Me (2007)
By: Helen Hunt (director, screenplay), Alice Arlen, Victor Levin (screenplay), Elinor Lipman (novel)
Starring: Helen Hunt, Bette Midler, Colin Firth, Matthew Broderick
A New York schoolteacher hits a midlife crisis when, in quick succession, her husband leaves, her adoptive mother dies and her biological mother, an eccentric talk show host, materializes and turns her life upside down as she begins a courtship with the father of one of her students.
Another short one, as I am both tired and unimpressed.
My film for tomorrow definitely needs to be something other than a melodrama, because this is two days in a row that I’ve chosen one that looked interesting and ended up being utterly tepid. Then She Found Me isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly good movie, either. The subject matter is fairly pedestrian, the mundane of being a modern adult without anything much to make it more than normal people doing normal things. There’s no real impact to even the important events. Colin Firth and Bette Midler are charming but get lost in the muddled story. As the lead, Helen Hunt isn’t very likeable or easy to relate to, and somehow she manages to have very little chemistry with Colin fucking Firth, which is a feat I wouldn’t have guessed possible, since he could create chemistry with a brick wall. Worst here is not that it’s a bad film in any immediately recognizable way, but rather that I never got any true sense of what it was trying to convey, which makes it entirely forgettable. Unless you’re a really big Firth fan, I’d skip it.
